Andersonville (the Movie)

“Five hundred men moved silently toward the gates that would shut out life and hope for most of them forever. Quarter of a mile from the railroad we came into a massive palisade with great squared logs standing upright in the ground. Fires blazed up and showed us a section of these and two massive wooden gates with heavy iron hinges and bolts. They swung open as we stood there and we passed through into the space beyond. We were at Andersonville.” – Private John McElroy.

A “camp” where laws were left standing at the vast wooden gate, a “camp” where the instinct to survive was the only proposal in the minds of the P.O.W’s; Georgia’s very own Andersonville was the most horrible Confederate Prisoner containment camp built during the Civil War. A total of 14,005 Union Soldiers entered Camp Sumter and of these, 12,912 died from disease, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure.

The camp was lead by a Swedish man named Captain Hennery Wirz. They said he had a screw loose and maybe that is why Sumter was what it was. Wirz was later arrested and charged with conspiring to "impair and injure the health and destroy the lives of federal prisoners" and with "murder in violation of the laws of war." At his trial in Washington D.C., scores of past prisoners testified against him, colorfully describing conditions at the prison. Such as, the absents of floodgates to help contain the filth from the confederate horse’s and men which as ran down into the camp via river. The way the camp was built to hold 10,000 prisoners, the prison was soon overcrowded, holding 22,000 by June. Although the prison was enlarged, the number of prisoners continued to swell. By August 1864, more than 32,000 prisoners were confined at Andersonville. Also, the lack of shelter from the searing heat and the bitter cold. Historical documents, however, attest to the fact that prison officials attempted to acquire supplies for the prisoners but were severely hampered by the need to...